


A Half-Open Sky

by Lykegenia



Series: Kitten - Cullen x Maighread Trevelyan [8]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-27 03:13:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17154212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lykegenia/pseuds/Lykegenia
Summary: Cullen and Maighread's relationship is blossoming, but old prejudices have left scars on them both.





	A Half-Open Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Cullen and Maighread's relationship is very much based on trust - not easy given their respective backgrounds. I've had this idea in my head for a while now, and I thought it time to share. This oneshot contains my headcanon that Cullen is demisexual.

The lights go out as they make it to his loft. Months of dancing around each other, moving cautiously, and it’s come to this, an easy stumble up the stairs she ordered installed for him, a moonlit tryst under a half-open sky. She only came to bid him goodnight, to make the most of their time together before she has to leave again in a few days, and to remind him that even commanders need to sleep. He shucked his armour and gloves hours before to make the paperwork easier. Then those hands found her hands, and her waist, and trailed up her sides as his lips found her mouth. A soft exploration, eager and full of joy as she pressed against him with the desk behind her cutting into the back of her thigh, his hummed pleasure descending to a growl that curled her toes when the west door opened and nearly spilled a scout into their privacy. He tugged her hand, after the latch slammed shut, and asked with darkened eyes for her to follow.

Her heart thunders. Fingers card through hair just starting to wind loose of its pomade, insistent enough that he smiles and kisses deeper against her mouth, sighs, dares to embrace her close and with the other hand strafe a path across her body that leaves her gasping.

“May I?” he asks, with his touch on the topmost button of her jacket.

This is what people do, isn’t it? Like stepping stones, one to the next. Pulling back to see him better, she marks his swollen mouth, the wrinkled frown between his brows, mingled concentration and lust, and the almost dazed blink of gold when she doesn’t immediately answer. She smirks. How many times has she sent herself over the edge imagining that face above her, beneath her, buried in the crook of her neck?

“You may.”

He presses back in as he works his way down, mouth and tongue hot as the first chill creeps through the widening gap in the fabric. Soon, when the garment loosens, he has to apply both hands to the project. Maighread stills, watching his fingers, the concentration drawn into his features, and when the last button pops free he barely has time to smile his triumph before she pulls him back to her mouth.

In other men, from what she has read in books, passion might inspire haste, but Cullen only slows, savours, tempts the ember of their shared desire until it roars high and bright in her blood. His hands slip beneath the opened ends of her jacket but makes no move to push it from her shoulders, only uses the new access to trace the form of her, down her back, across the crest of her hips, rising along the shape of her ribs in reverent symmetry. His mouth drops to her throat when she gasps his name, when his palms mould to the shape of her breasts and squeeze. Her whole body ticks against him; her mind whites with the feeling, the graze of teeth along her throat. All she can do is grip his shoulders and lean in, hope he understands, because beyond that she doesn’t know how to ask, _can’t_ ask, the words overburdened on her tongue, the thoughts jumbled and distracted because he’s doing _that_ with his mouth – to her neck –

She makes a noise of complaint when he pulls away, her body swaying after him, and blinks eyes open slowly when he doesn’t return.

“You went very still there,” he explains. His hands are steady, barely touching, at her waist.

“I…” She has to try twice. “I was enjoying it.”

A shaky sigh escapes with his grin, relief and something hungrier. “More?”

Gazes locked, she nods. Breath heaves in her chest as fingertips first guide the jacket down her arms, then retract – lightly, ever so lightly – up the path towards her shoulders and down to the tucked-in hem of her shirt. He wavers, like he wants to kiss her, but he doesn’t, only watches her face as he grasps the fabric and lifts it high over her head.

There’s silence as Cullen looks again, his eyes as heavy on her skin as the night-time chill, and for the first time discomfort crawls beneath her skin.

“There’s no need to stare,” she mutters, and draws her arms in across her chest.

He looks up, frowns. “Not staring,” he murmurs with a quick kiss. “Admiring.” And yet, he leaves his touch on her elbows, letting her decide when she’s ready to move, to open up to him again.

Uncertainty tempers her movement, keeps her eyes pressed shut, but she lets go the tension in her shoulders and reaches out nonetheless, a hand to steady herself on his bicep. The other finds his chest, the unsteady pulse of heart beneath muscle and bone. Their breath mingles. He tilts his head again and she gives him the kiss as their fingers twine, gentle and dizzying.

“How did this happen?” The question comes as Cullen’s hands drift over bared skin, marking outline and contour and the ragged, puckered lines of the scar that extends down Maighread’s left side, raking from her middle back to the point of her hip.

“A bear,” she explains, glancing at it. “Not long after I left the Circle behind. It was raining and I needed shelter – I didn’t expect the cave to be inhabited already but it wasn’t expecting company either, so it only got me once before I managed to kill it. I didn’t want to.” A self-deprecating chuckle. “And I’m… not very good with healing spells – I made a bit of a mess of patching myself up.”

“It looks like it was deep,” he muses as he follows the claw marks up, to where the end slips under the edge of her band. In the dark she can’t read his expression, but he’s close, warmth and sweat and oakmoss balm surrounding her, and the irregular pattern of his breathing tells her enough of what he wants.

She glances to the bed. Huffs a laugh. “I’ve never done it on a mattress before.”

Regrets the words instantly.

Cullen leans back, tense. “Never…?” he tries. “Are you…?”

She laughs again, a bitter edge to it this time, and turns her gaze towards the crack in the roof. “No. I did it once, out of curiosity more than anything, because everyone seemed to care about it so much. It was… disappointing.” When she glances to him, itchy with embarrassment, the earnest pull of his mouth brings the whole story tumbling from her mouth. “After, I found him bragging, saying I was something to keep life in the Circle from getting too boring – it turned out I was a conquest, he didn’t care about me at all.”

“What happened?”

“He tried to get me alone again and I froze him to a wall. It took the templars hours to find him, longer to thaw the spell.” With a swallow, she turns, pulling her hair over one shoulder so he can see. “One lash for every knuckle he lost to frostbite – that’s what they gave me.”

The scars across her back stand out livid white against her skin, seven silver cross-hatches she never looks at in the mirror.

“‘They’ being the templars,” he says, and she nods as he brushes the stripes with his thumb.

“They rubbed salt in and wouldn’t let the grand enchanter heal them.”

The silence behind her deafens. The scars are a door she keeps locked, the key hidden away where the humiliation can’t reach her. It wasn’t just the punishment, the way her clothes grated on tender flesh for a week afterwards – it was the whispers following in her wake, the snide remarks, the nicknames. The loneliness of being left behind wondering what went wrong. And that was back when she was nobody, another mage locked and forgotten in a tower, rather than the singular saviour of Thedas, whom nobody can see fall. She cannot fall.

Cullen’s breath dances on the back of her neck.

“I shouldn’t do this.”

“What?”

She startles away from his touch. “This – I’m sorry, we shouldn’t – I should go –” Already snatching her things, she ducks out of reach, unable to face the mixture of confusion and heartbreak she knows she’ll read in his face, but it halts her in his voice instead.

“Maighread.”

She’s always arrested by the quality of her name on his lips. He stands motionless, apparently with no thought to what he would do beyond getting her attention, the commander left stumbling like a recruit. And she’s a coward for being caught here, on the top stair, between desire to offer comfort and the conviction to leave before she gets swallowed whole by whatever it is now holding her heart in a vice.

A sigh. He straightens, and almost rips his shirt over his head, and now they stand equal. The moonlight through the ceiling paints him with shadows. He’s lean, with the look of one half-starved slowly clawing back their health, though his shoulders are broad and his muscles well-defined from his daily hours of training. A spray of fluffed, curled hair sweeps over his chest, darker than expected against his night-pale skin, narrowing into a path that follows the line of his abdominals down to the waistband of his breeches, except where the path is cut across by a scar that looks like it was once a sword wound to the belly.

He has a lot of scars. She halts forward, gaze scattering over his torso, only to return again and again to a set of long, narrow lines like the drag of fingernails, cauterized into the flesh across his shoulder.

“I know what did this,” she breathes, and stops herself from touching it. He told her about Kinloch, but to see the evidence of it burned into him, inescapable, sickens her. “No wonder you hated mages.” How can they take this further, avatars as they are for two sides of a war that never had a beginning?

Cullen reaches for her. “I don’t want you to go.”

A flicker of realisation stings her: nobody knows where she is. Tenderness radiates from every inch of him, bashful hope like a gift, but for half a heartbeat the old fear returns, memories of eyes watching, flickers of stories about templars who were tender, until they weren’t. He has no lyrium, but he trained as a killer. Her eyes dart to the bed again.

He notices, grimaces, steps back. “Forgive me. I should not keep you.”

“Cullen…”

And again, regret. She wants to fix that sad smile, the one that tells her everything is alright when it’s not, and she wants done with all the barriers and the uncertainty and the way not letting go keeps hurting them both. With balled fists, she crosses to the bed and sits, squashing her anxiety in a challenging glance back across the gulf between them, and only demures when curiosity gets the better of his confusion and brings him to sit next to her, with a deliberate inch of space between them. A moment passes, and then when he holds a hand out into the space, palm up, she sags against his shoulder as she takes it. It takes another sighed breath to force the tension from her body.

“I thought this would be easier,” she admits.

Cullen, contemplative, brushes a kiss to her temple. “I know, but difficult doesn’t mean impossible if you still want to try. And if you don’t, then –”

“I do.” A squeeze of his hand. “I care about you so much. I –” But those words are locked behind another wall, and her tongue freezes up just thinking about them. She ducks her head deeper against his chest instead.

For a moment he cranes around to try and read her expression, buried in his neck, and by slow degrees they sink backwards onto the mattress, side by side, her head still pillowed on his shoulder. When he asks if what they’re doing is alright, she nods and turns her gaze towards the hole in the roof, and they settle there, wrapped around each other, relaxing more with each slow breath until the silence consumes them with sleep hovering just beyond the idle trace of fingers over skin.

“You don’t want to go further?” Maighread asks, because she must.

Above her, Cullen shakes his head. “Most of the time when I imagine being with you it’s like this, being close, able to touch you.” His voice is rough, scratchy. “I never thought I’d even be this lucky.”

“Oh…”

“What’s ‘oh’?”

She tucks closer, cards through the hair on his chest with a lazy sort of fascination. “I thought men… you know. Thought about sex. A lot.”

“I’m sure some do,” he answers, after a pause. “For the most part, it never interested me. Not that I’m incapable, of course, it just… doesn’t often form part of my thoughts about a person.”

“And me?”

A small grunt, and he rises away from her, onto his elbows so he can look at her properly, and slides a still-tender hand under her jaw. “I want every part of you, and I want to give you everything, but only if that’s what you want as well.”

His face is difficult to see in the dark, but his voice holds only certainty, and care, and trust like she’s never wanted before – and once more she’s too overwhelmed to speak. So, instead, she smiles against his hand and leans into his warmth, his heartbeat, and hopes that by these small actions he’ll know she wants exactly the same.


End file.
